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The Tumeroks blog reports that the University of California, Berkeley is now offering a class on Blizzard's Starcraft real-time strategy game. "This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course. Furthermore, the class will take the theoretical into the practical world by analyzing games and replays to reinforce decision-making skills and advanced Starcraft theory."

There's no such thing as a Robotics Lab in Starcraft. There is, however, a Robotics Support Bay and a Robotics Facility, but those are Protoss buildings. Having a Terran and a Protoss prerequisite makes so sense. Perhaps you meant a Physics Lab? Now if you excuse me, I have to dodge the incoming projectiles that have been thrown at me by people who don't give a shit.

I knew Robotics Lab wasn't quite right. It's been a very long time, and my Starcraft discs wont install under 10.5 (or was that Elite Force? one of my retro games needs classic to install, even if it has a universal binary once it's all up and running).

I would argue that in order to take a class on Starcraft, you'd be able to capture a Terran SCV and build yourself both prerequisites though.

The origional Unreal and Half Life were 2 others that also worked under WINE perfectly back in the day too. Unreal Tournament and Quake II & III had Linux binaries as well. The FPS genre did quite well under Linux in the 90's

The origional Unreal and Half Life were 2 others that also worked under WINE perfectly back in the day too. Unreal Tournament and Quake II & III had Linux binaries as well. The FPS genre did quite well under Linux in the 90's

Oh yeah. I was playing all the games that our LAN party played on Linux, while everyone else was using Windows. Well, except the one who ran OSX.

There's no such thing as a Robotics Lab in Starcraft. There is, however, a Robotics Support Bay and a Robotics Facility, but those are Protoss buildings. Having a Terran and a Protoss prerequisite makes so sense. Perhaps you meant a Physics Lab? Now if you excuse me, I have to dodge the incoming projectiles that have been thrown at me by people who don't give a shit.

*ducks

Wasn't it possible to capture enemy buildings? It's been ages since I played starcraft, b

Ahem, this is untrue. The zerg could capture Terran command centers thus creating zerg human hybrids that you could run in to enemy units and blow themselves up. I think the grand parent was thinking of Command and Conquer though, where taking over buildings was possible.

No, in a game against terran, 'toss can mind control an SCV to build terran buildings and units. It's possible to have both buildings. =)

Ahh, it's all slowly coming back to me. In fact, as near as I can tell, I was thinking of the Zerg capturing terran command center. In most of my PVP games of starcraft all those years ago, it was terran v. Zerg, so the protoss mind control didn't happen that often. Still, it was awesome when it did!

I don't think you have read this entire thread. The GP and GGP were saying you couldn't directly take over buildings in Starcraft (excluding the zerg queen being able to infest a Terran command center, but really it still becomes a Zerg building type (Infested Commanded Center)). Neither GP nor GGP were implying that it was impossible to have both buildings, just that there was no way to directly convert them to your side (like command and conquer).

Depends on the course number really. NR20 would make the course a bit longer and focus on late game aspects.

As an anecdote, my buddies would join a game (no rules), all selecting terran, and then immediately rush a player simultaneously with all our SCVs, and then move on to the next player after their probes were dead and weren't building any, repairing each others SCVs as neccesary. We would then move onto the next player. If we had 4 people we always won 3v3 obviously, with 3v3 we would win immediately about 90% of the time assuming no one quit. Many people complimented us on our bizzare strategy:-D Maybe I should send the prof an email.

If you had four buddies colluding in a 3v3 then you weren't really playing the game, you were just being jerks. If you had three in a 3v3 (all on one team) then it is a valid strategy. But it should never work against non-newbies since the other team should outnumber your SCVs by the time you reach their bases. Or at least the third target should have real defenses and a strong economy by the time you reach him and be able to counter you easily.

Yeah, 4 in a 3v3 was boring. However, with regards to a normal 3v3, that wasn't the case. We were able to usually defeat them. This was on a top versus bottom big money map, standard maps would make this tactic near impossible. The reason why we won was because we always outnumbered the opponent, we have 12 or so SCVs to their 4 or 5. by the time we got to the third person, we still had more scvs than they had and didn't have time to build a barracks to completion. Keep in mind that this whole time we would

Because they didn't report it first either? The posting date on the article is from January 27. This topic [teamliquid.net] was posted by the student teaching the decal on January 22, to a popular foreign (i.e. not Korean) starcraft website. Or you could just link to the facebook group [facebook.com], or the class website [phswebs.com].

The class website has already posted the first three weeks of homework assignments [phswebs.com], and the syllabus [phswebs.com]. There are sections for notes and for classwork, but they are blank. From the syllabus, this is the projected course load:

About the use of the campaign editor, I think it's likely that they will make use of it briefly to outline specific situations. However, there are third party starcraft map editors that are more powerful than the built-in one, and for any custom maps, it's likely that SCMdraft will be the map editor of choice. Based off of the course syllabs, my guess is that they will focus on pro maps both new and old, and all-time favorites.

Well, its is basically a case study class. Many college and especially grad school classes are case studies. I don't see a problem in studying game mechanics of a successful game any more than studying the engineering of a successful rocket or studying the economic policies of a successful empire. All the same academic role, or course, assuming a similar degree of rigor.

Yep. My wife is a psychology grad student and aside from the practicums (which are, in and of themselves, real, live case studies), even the classes that are regular classes consist of a bunch of case studies.

So she's up to her ears in case studies. All I hear about all day are things like "More case studies! Argh!"

Yeah, Occasionally they actually run a nethack course too, Very interesting, but it's not run by a prof as you may guess. (And yes, I watched a few lessons)
"Nethack rule 1, Your pet is smarter then you"

... they should instead use TASpring [clan-sy.com] (see also spring.jobjol.nl [jobjol.nl]
) which, besides being free software, has a huge community behind, is cross platform and developed with talent and passion.

the Balanced Annihilation mod really lets you enjoy strategy to a decent level of detail, while slashdot readers should really have a look at the geeky Kernel Panic mod...

starcraft has been patched and refined so many times since 1998 that it is a near perfect example of balanced strategy which requires long term planning as well as short term planning, instant decisions and twitch.

there is no 'annihilation' mode in starcraft. you have to carefully craft your strategy.

sc can be won through either macromanagement strategy or micromanagement. the longer the game takes, winning through microing becomes increasingly harder. IF, someone is still able to win through micro at late game against an opponent who has superior macro, there is probably nothing you can teach that person in regard to war theory.

Starcraft is over 10 years old and is still one of the most popular online games in the world. Starcraft is still the most popular game at the world cyber games (professional online gamer Olympics). The game has set 4 Guinness records, including "Best Selling PC Strategy Game". Korea has three tv channels that broadcast nothing but Starcraft games 24/7.

I agree with the parent completely. There has not been a comparable RTS since Starcraft, and there most likely never will be. There are two main aspects of a player's actions that have an effect on the outcome of a competitive game: strategy and execution. A few genres will forgo one entirely for the sake of the other. Chess (or any TBS game), for example, removes all execution for the sake of creating a pure strategy game. Fighters remove all strategy for the sake of creating a pure execution game. RTS games are one of the few genres which embrace both aspects to the fullest extent.

Or, at least, that is what they claim to do.

Every RTS game that I have seen or heard of since Starcraft was released has sought to remove execution from the equation, and those which fail at balance inadvertently remove the strategy, as well. While lowering the execution bar makes the game more widely accessible for competitive play, the amount of depth in the game is lowered with it. Squad-based RTS are the most glaring example of this. In Starcraft, you could easily write entire books on each unit in the game and the various ways to micromanage them in nearly every situation in order to utilize them to their maximum effectiveness. To this day, people are still discovering small AI quirks which you can exploit to your advantage. In a squad-based RTS, however, this kind of control is removed from the player's hands. Units can only be given approximate orders, take cover on their own, are impossible (or incredibly difficult) to use individually, etc. Another major change is that the overall pace of combat in Starcraft is incredibly fast compared to most other RTS games since. In Blizzard's own WC3, for example, the unit health has been raised so high and the unit damage lowered so much that it takes an order of magnitude longer for units to be destroyed. Contrast this with Starcraft, for example, where the lowly zergling (when upgraded) is one of the highest DPS units in the game (and the highest by far when comparing by resource cost) and 2-4 of them can flatten almost any ground unit in a matter of seconds. You might argue that Starcraft has a relatively high unit count, which is why units in other RTS seem to die so much slower, and you'd be right. This is also yet another example of removing complexity and depth for the sake of accessibility.

Now, it's hard to fault game developers for these changes, though. The fact is that these days, the "hardcore" market is significantly smaller than the more casual market to which these games are catering to. Game companies are, in the end, looking to make money. Creating a game which can be played on a deep competitive level is either an afterthought at best, or more often, simply not considered. Starcraft is likely to be the last truly competitive RTS that we will ever see.

As a side note, if you're interested in the topic, I would recommend heading to http://www.sirlin.net/ [sirlin.net] and checking out their lengthy running discussion revolving around their hopes for Starcraft 2.

I can just imagine the first class. The teacher will be standing there wondering where all his students are, then all of a sudden... "ZERG RUSH!", and everyone tries to squish through the classroom door all at once.

You mean a class where you sit playing a game on your laptop while some professor is at the board giving a lecture? I had that class in college. I called it physics101... and intro to computer science... and... well you get the picture.

I don't think sticking blocks certain places is all that complex. The only decision in tetris is should you wait for that straight line to come down or is it getting too high so that you need to start removing some lines so you don't risk losing. It is very simple, then they just make it faster to make it more difficult. You can say anything is similar to something if you simplify it enough. But really, you are comparing a bike to a motorcycle. Not saying it is more or less fun, just that there is a he

Keep in mind that it's at a university, not high school. The students are there because they chose to be there, and they're free to leave at any time they want to.

I'm not saying "don't make the subject matter fun": please do that. But say I were to hire you based on your understanding of game theory; would I rather have one who spent half a year on doing the math, do you think, or one who spent half a year on doing some of the math and another part just playing games?

Unless I want you as my StarCraft coach, you, as a student, will have better marketable value by doing the math.

And hey, for my Algorithmic Game Theory course, I presented a paper showing how employing a tit-for-tat strategy in bittorrent leads to a market equilibrium. So it's not like you're forced to do dull stuff.

On the other hand, all I ever hear about hiring and degrees is that they don't care a whit about your actual education, since all that academic "theory" is supposedly crap anyway, right? All they want is proof that you can finish something. So people take that to heart and make courses like this, and then the people doing the hiring want to complain because we actually listened to them? People can't constantly go on about how worthless degrees are other than "for proving you can finish something" and then a

It's called "Game Theory" and it's used to design compilers and wage wars. The Chinese are very good at it; look up the Chinese Remainder Theorem for an interesting but non-game-theory innovation of Chinese warfare. Also there's the Byzantine Generals Problem, the Prisoner Dilemma, etc, that all fall under this subject.

It's basically identical to discrete, turn-based theory, except time is an analog resource. Waiting is analogous to passing turns in chess without moving, except that you can somehow magically pass half a turn, or a quarter turn.... (there's a specific field resolution and velocity of travel and rate of attack etc for each unit, so you could come up with a minimal "turn" length, but...)

If conducted at the same level of depth as TFA, a course on spreading butter on bread could well be a quite tricky one. Doing an analysis of how an irregular mixed water/lipid substance(whose properties change rapidly with temperature) behaves when applied to an irregular heated surface could be pretty hairy.

Not to mention having to do that research paper on dropping toast.....does it always land butter side down? What if both sides are buttered? What if neither side is buttered? Can you create some weird perpetual motion machine by buttering half of each side?

But I don't want to fight the cat. I was thinking a set up more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer [wikipedia.org] with the black being buttered and the white being unbuttered. Set it up horizontally and see how it "falls".

I don't see how it's any different from say studying the theory of chess

It's actually an even more complex and more interesting thing to study than chess, despite its "humble" origins as just a video game played by the masses. Players have to work with incomplete knowledge (they cannot see all of the opponents' pieces, like in chess). Notice also that opponents was plural -- enemies may turn on each other, or gang up on you. Also, in chess you have time to sit and think (aside from not overrunning the ga

Actually, they really don't stand any chance unless the player(s) intentionally avoid certain strategies which badly exploit the AI. Playing against AIs can still be fun in a "Can I win without doing X, Y, or Z" type of way, but while SC's AI is very advanced for its day, it's not even close to a standard chess program in terms of skill required to defeat it.

On the other hand, SC2 will supposedly have an AI so good it will *not* need to cheat - either through seeing the whole map or getting extra resource i

In Chess you have a few seconds to think about something, depending on how much time is on your chess clock; I may be able to spend 30 second deciding a move, some moves may take 3 seconds and others minutes.

Starcraft is realtime, and so moves are not discrete. In Starcraft, my decisions have an impact at the point they're made. If I need 3 minutes to decide how to handle a besieging army, it may be too late to build more forces; it may also be too late to actually resist, the game might be over. If I

If you do start to beat him, he will just drop out. This happens a lot, people just cant deal with loss.Me and a friend use to team up. Both playing protos, he would focus on on building carriers, I focused on men, with a strong preference to worker drones, as they are the most powerful character in the game. So we build a small attack force, and with the men I attach a couple of workers. We drop them off all the chaos of war and fighting once the smoke clears we found that my worker has built a pilons wit

Sorry I haven't played in years. Even though I had fun with the games, I didn't have it run my life and really get to know each character personally.I never said I was a master, but it was sure fun to come up with different strategies, that some times completely obliterated the guy who though he was all that.

How in the world was this modded insightful? Getting things wrong and defending yourself when you're wrong is insightful? You don't have to have something run your life to avoid giving inaccurate information about it.

Island maps (of the non-unlimited-case variety) can make stealing another race worthwhile (and often possible, since Mind Control on a transport gets you whatever is inside s well). That said, serious players tend to avoid island maps, so I suppose the point is moot.

You and a friend team up. One member builds carriers, you use your dark archons to capture em way beyond your food limit. Imagine being the other guy suddenly swarmed with OVER NINE THOUSAND carriers (and 8 interceptors each). If you don't kill his base, it'll surely kill his computer.

That is why we launch some ground units too to fight those guys. The point isn't to win the battle but to stall until the cannons are made. For the most part people don't see the strategy as the game has blimps covering the guy building the cannons, so they just send guys to fight the blimps, whos goal is survive long enough to get the cannons up.

There's a field of study called "game theory" that's used to design operating system schedulers, lock contention resolution systems, symmetric multiprocessing systems, all sorts of AI, and compilers. Research typically dives into games like Chess, and Go, etc. This is a very valuable course.